Consumers of telecommunications services are constantly demanding new and more advanced services to facilitate their personal communications. Examples of such services include call forwarding, personal 1-800 service, roaming services, and caller ID. Advanced telecommunications systems often include a service control point that contains a database. The database may be used in conjunction with many of the advanced services demanded by telephone users. For example, a service switching point (SSP) may transmit a dialed 1-800 number to a service control point to receive the actual routing number associated with the dialed 1-800 number. The actual routing number may vary, depending upon, for example, the time the dialed 1-800 number call was placed or the originating location of the dialed 1-800 number. A database in the service control point is accessed with the dialed 1-800 number, and information associated with that 1-800 number and an appropriate routing number is selected from the database for transmission back to the service switching point.
A customer of a telecommunications system such as, for example, MCI, Sprint, AT&T, or GTE, may place customer information into the database by accessing the service control point. Examples of placing information into the database in the service control point include adding subscriber names and information associated with the subscriber and updating current entries to reflect changes in data associated with a subscriber. The placing or modifying of information contained within a database in the service control point is commonly referred to as database provisioning.
Database provisioning is required both when new services are made available to a subscriber and when subscriber information is changed. New services are created in a service creation environment by, for example, the designer and operator of a telecommunications system, such as, for example, DSC Communications Incorporated. The new services are created in the service creation environment and the database in the service control point is modified to reflect the new services.
Conventional methods for provisioning databases suffer several disadvantages. For example, conventionally when a database in the service control point is updated to reflect new services, a new protocol, or interface, for communication between a user and the newly created database is required. Because a new protocol is conventionally required, the time to implement new services is lengthy and expensive, sometimes taking six to nine months to implement.